Curated by Lewis Johnson
Diana Page's solo exhibition at Büyükdere35, primarily featuring her recent works in painting, digital animation, and prints, provides an opportunity for the distinctive potentials of painting and related art forms to come together. This often overlooked and underappreciated potential can be highlighted through the notion of "idyllic."
Who can deny the significant potential a painting holds in addressing the perception of the "idyllic"? Various painting genres in many cultures explore the ideal place and local perception. The exhibition, to be held at Büyükdere35 in September, by South African artist Diana Page, who lives and works in Istanbul, offers viewers the idyllic perception found in Western culture, particularly in the history of modern art, and the idealization that influences its formation.
Page, in her various styles of work, paints places and the local by evoking creative engagements with this historically charged notion. Her paintings, depicting unbalanced, damaged, and awkward locations, where she calls upon the ideally desired using strong pigments, illustrate a phenomenon that can be expressed with the term "trans-idyllic." The concept of trans-idyllic suggests expanding our perceptions of idyllic and anti-idyllic, to include or exclude ourselves, to move these boundaries based on our perceptions, and ultimately to turn our experiences in spaces into shared experiences.
The selection of paintings, ranging from large to small scale, demonstrates that the artist engages with concepts inherited from modern art to make sense of utopian and dystopian perceptions of her present-day sense of place and locality. Alongside paintings, the exhibition includes digital animations and prints created using capacitive exsan, presenting a photographic representation of the cultural dominance and influence under which Page operates, and conveying the intensity of the pleasure derived from movement to the audience.
The term "idyllic" was used in the third century BCE to describe poems by Theocritus, who focused on natural beauties, rural life, and also urbanites. The concept is derived from a Greek word meaning "small picture."
